Adverse Childhood Experiences Impact Health and Wellness: Implications for Prevention

Childhood experiences have a tremendous impact on lifelong development, health, and opportunity. Child maltreatment and other early adversities have been linked to a host of negative outcomes, including decreased intellectual development and academic achievement, poor mental and physical health, and early death. While early adversity is a significant public health problem, it can be prevented. CDC’s Essentials for Childhood framework provides leadership to child maltreatment and broader public health fields by promoting strategies to assure safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments for all children. By promoting contexts that help create communities in which every child can thrive we can help children achieve their maximal health and life potential.

During this presentation, participants will be introduced to the public health framework of childhood maltreatment and other adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). We will outline the history of the original CDC-Kaiser ACE Study and provide an overview of CDC’s current ACE work, including findings from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS)’s ACE module. These findings will highlight the association between early adversity and important health, wellness, and life potential outcomes. In addition, we will discuss CDC’s framework for child maltreatment prevention, Essentials for Childhood, which will highlight efforts used to inform prevention programs and policy, including how states’ have used their BRFSS ACE data to inform state prevention action. Throughout the presentation we will discuss available resources and tools that public health practitioners may use to raise awareness and inform child maltreatment prevention actions. In doing so, those attending will be able to integrate the role of prevention into their understanding of how different sectors can work together to promote lifelong health and wellbeing by preventing child maltreatment and other early adversities.